THE FOOD OUR
CHILDREN EAT

How to Get Children to Like Good Food

Joanna Blythman

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

A few pages to read first

PART ONE: THE GHETTO OF ‘CHILDREN’S FOOD’

The modern ‘children’s diet’

‘Picky-eater’ culture

Parents’ attitudes

The rot begins with those little jars

Staggered eating

Sweets as food

Crisp crazy

The flickering screen

Gift-wrapped junk

Goodbye dinner lady, hello cash cafeteria

Child (un)friendly restaurants

PART TWO: BREAKING THE MOULD AT HOME

The real-food approach

Getting the message across

Spending priorities

The ‘tunnel effect’ and how to prevent it

Eating together and why it matters

The ‘never-satisfied’ snacker

Don’t keep food you don’t want children to eat

Presentation, boredom and the ‘yuck’ reaction

Sweets, treats and bans

Good food that children like

What children should drink

Healthier look-alike alternatives to common ‘children’s foods’

PART THREE: THE GENTLE ART OF PERSUASION

Dealing with children who say no

Avoiding the same old mistakes

Setting up a cooperative food relationship

Refining objections to food

Serving up praise by the bucketload

Making mealtimes work

The scope for insistence

Giving in gracefully but …

PART FOUR: GETTING IT RIGHT WITH BABIES AND TODDLERS

You know best

The essential blender

Introducing the world of food

Pesticide residue risks and the organic alternative

PART FIVE: INFLUENCING WHAT CHILDREN EAT WHEN YOU’RE NOT THERE

What you can expect from childcarers

Negotiating with nurseries and playgroups

The friend’s house

School food

PART SIX: TESTING SITUATIONS

Shopping tips

Car trips

Birthday parties

Grandparents’ houses

PART SEVEN: CONSOLIDATING YOUR EFFORTS

Encouraging children to cook

The fun and skill of food shopping

The fascinating world of restaurant food

Exercising junior tastebuds

PART EIGHT: NITTY-GRITTY IDEAS AND RECIPES FOR INSPIRATION

Twenty-five good snacks

Ten main courses that both adults and children like

Ten good drinks

Ten good packed lunches

Ten ways to get children to eat vegetables

Ten ideas for making eating more fun

Ten easy recipes that children can make

Appendix: Checklist of Additives to Avoid

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

A FEW PAGES TO READ FIRST

This is a book for people who want their children to become adults with wide-ranging food tastes, adults who select a good diet for themselves and find pleasure in the process of eating.

Achieving such an outcome ought to be a straightforward matter, but these days children who fit this bill are something of an endangered species. Children no longer eat what adults eat. We now live in a world that assumes children must be catered for separately, from a repertoire of special ‘children’s foods’ designed to please their distinctive palate.

In the new millennium, perhaps sociologists and social historians will look back on the second half of the twentieth century and point to the emergence of this separate diet as a curious phenomenon. When you stop to think about it, it’s a huge watershed. For centuries children all over the world have been brought up to eat what their parents ate.

Traditionally, children’s food has always been inextricably linked with adult diet, right from day one. Children were breastfed – even if that meant finding a wet nurse.

Graduating on to more complex foods, they were fed ground-down, pulverised versions of what the extended family was eating. As soon as they had teeth and had become more independent, they ate whatever was produced in the kitchen in whatever form it emerged.

Now in many industrialised countries, and in the UK in particular, it’s more likely that children are tucking into a restricted number of specifically ‘children’s foods’. We are all too familiar with them. The working title ‘junk’ fits them as well as any other. But if we wanted to analyse that loaded term a little further, we might describe it as consisting of a small selection of highly processed, long-life foods – many technological interventions removed from their raw-food roots – heavily loaded with fat, sugar and salt.

Enter the ‘modern’ child and a typical food day. This might start with a bowl of highly refined cereal stuck together with sugar in one form or another, followed by a sweet drink and a packet of crisps for morning snack. Chips and custard might be the most popular canteen choice at lunchtime, or a protein and fat-based, vegetable-free sandwich in the lunch box, accompanied by sweets, a token apple (if you’re lucky) and often yet another packet of crisps. In the starving after-school interval, biscuits and more crisps fill the gap until an early ‘children’s teatime’, when out come the frozen Kievs, fish fingers, pizzas and burgers, destined to be scoffed with chips and copious amounts of ketchup and washed down by something sweet and fizzy. For pudding, there’s the sickly-sweet ‘kiddie’ yogurt with its lovable cartoon characters and child-friendly synthetic flavours. Not surprisingly, by bedtime they’re hungry again and it’s time for supper. That packet of cereal beckons once more, as do the biscuits.

The consequences of this change in our attitude towards child nutrition are so enormous that they are hard to grasp. We are embarked on an experiment with our children’s health that is unprecedented. This is a radical departure from the tried and tested way of nourishing children that societies have adopted since history began.

You don’t have to be a paediatrician to figure out that this sort of eating defies the laws of nutrition. Nearly every item has been processed out of its natural form. It is top-heavy on ingredients we know cause health problems long-term and notoriously short on those that keep the human body healthy: whole, unprocessed plant foods, especially fruit and vegetables. So we are living through a strange irony. Instead of being given the best food available, as they ought to be, children are being given the worst.

It is going to take time for the impact of this major change in eating patterns to show through but initial indications are not good. Worrying tales have emerged from the US, where doctors have been shocked by the premature furring up of arteries that has inadvertently come to light when children have been admitted to hospital as road casualties.

Teachers complain that their pupils’ concentration span is not what it should be because they are going from one quick sugary snack to another and simply don’t have the stamina that a long, slow release of nutrients from a balanced diet would give them. According to the World Health Organisation, ‘The prevalence of overweight and obesity is increasing worldwide at an alarming rate … Moreover, as the problem appears to be increasing rapidly in children as well as adults, the truth health consequences may only become fully apparent in the distant future.’

Knowing how far this modern children’s diet is from any concept of good food, let alone healthy eating, an outside observer might assume that it is the prerogative of a poor and disadvantaged underclass that can’t afford to feed its children properly. But junk food is the great leveller. These days children from affluent backgrounds often eat as badly as their less privileged counterparts. The nation’s youth, it seems, is united in its attachment to junk.

Many parents recognise that they are not feeding their children the way they themselves were fed when young and they worry about this. But our anxieties are soothed by the overwhelming cynicism that surrounds the whole subject of feeding children. The fact that most children in the U K eat extremely badly has become institutionalised. Though new parents set out with good intentions, puréeing wholesome foods and vowing to be different, there’s a prevalent feeling that it’s only a matter of time till children graduate on to the modern crisps-and-cola, burgers-and-turkey-nugget repertoire. After all, they encounter it everywhere – at school, at friends’ houses, at the corner shop, on television.

The pressure on children to eat junk is so strong and so widespread that many parents simply throw in the towel. Why fight the inevitable, especially when no one else seems to be bothered? And there’s succour to be had from the feeling of safety in numbers, too. If all those freezer cabinets are full of pre-fried, re-formed bits of cheap animal protein targeted at children, surely they can’t be too bad? If the neighbourhood créche recommends crisps as a morning snack because fruit makes too much mess, who are we to stick out our necks and say differently? So many children live on this typical ‘children’s diet’ that surely it must be the norm?

Thus we live in hope that sooner or later, as though by magic, our offspring will be transformed miraculously into sensible adults with wide-ranging, sophisticated food tastes. We fondly imagine that burger-and-biscuit-addicted Kevin or Holly will turn into a marvellous eighteen-year-old who adores spinach salad, or stir-fried squid, aubergine and anchovies.

If you find those rationalisations comforting, then you may not want to read on. This book is for people who have the gut reaction that, however ubiquitous and common it might have become, the typical children’s diet is unacceptable. First, because it drastically limits children’s food horizons and therefore their ability to get pleasure from the delicious diversity of foods available, not to mention the sociable rituals that surround eating. Second, because it deviates so much from any notion of good nutrition that it stores up problems for their long-term health.

The core is that we need separate and different children’s food about as badly as we need a fatal illness. Instead, we should abandon the whole concept and reintegrate children into mainstream eating.

The ideas and strategies in this book are designed to help parents who want their children to eat better and who are prepared to put some effort into achieving that goal. The basic approach can work with children of all ages, even those who have already become accustomed to eating the typical children’s junk food. It is based on my knowledge as a specialist food journalist and my experience as a parent. The first has given me the conviction that we cannot afford to be passive about children’s junk because it amounts to a modern brand of malnutrition. The second has shown me that children can come to appreciate and actively desire a wide range of good, wholesome unprocessed food if the adults who feed them are committed to that idea.

My children, aged fourteen and ten, do not eat absolutely everything that I might as an adult, but they will eat, or at least try, most things. They have their likes and dislikes, as do adults. Mushrooms and aubergine get the joint thumbs-down. One refuses tomatoes but adores avocado; the other leaves the avocado and wolfs down the tomatoes. Nevertheless, they both eat a wide range of different foods from all food groups and there are no complete categories of food – such as vegetables – that are no-go areas. What pleases me most is that they actively enjoy eating. Meals aren’t just a refuelling exercise. They are enthusiastic eaters who approach even new foods with a positive and open attitude.

Some people wonder how they came to be this way. ‘What did you do with them?’ they ask. ‘Mine won’t eat that way, your kids are different,’ they remark. It’s an interesting cultural shift to see how children who eat reasonably widely and well have become the exception rather than the rule.

The answer is that there is absolutely nothing complicated, or even particularly demanding, about producing children who eat well. I have done nothing with my children that hasn’t already been done by generations of parents. The approach amounts to little more than common sense. It is just that these days, children’s junk food is so prevalent that parents think that the old laws of nutrition no longer apply. We need to be reminded of them.

So this book offers a common-sense strategy for getting children to eat better – one that also makes the job of feeding children easier, not harder. There are workable and effective strategies for every testing situation but, in essence, the approach is terribly simple.

HOW TO GET YOUR CHILDREN TO EAT WELL

• Feed children the same food you yourself eat.

• Socialise children into good eating habits by eating with them as much as you possibly can.

• Consciously open up children’s food horizons by introducing them to a wide range of tastes.

• Keep on presenting them with a wide range of foods even if they resist them at first: they will learn to like what they are given.

• Give them the freshest, most nutritious and best-quality food you possibly can.

This is the opposite of how many modern children eat.

HOW TO GET YOUR CHILDREN TO EAT BADLY

• Give them different food from that which you yourself eat.

• Feed them separately most of the time.

• Stereotype them as having narrow food horizons and therefore offer them only a limited number of foods.

• When they reject a food, do not offer it to them again consistently.

• Give them the most processed, least satisfying and least nutritious food around, otherwise known as ‘children’s food’.

The underlying assumption in the points above is that there is only one kind of food suitable for children – good food – and that the best way to deliver that is to socialise them into adult eating patterns and tastes from the time they are weaned. I firmly believe that the modern idea of separate children’s food, which assumes that children have different requirements from adults, is the enemy of good eating in the long term. By going down that ‘separate’ and ‘different’ road, food manufacturers have got away with transforming children’s food into a junk-food ghetto.

For this reason, I have deviated from other children’s eating guides by not including recipes for separate ‘children’s’ dishes. This book does, however, include recipes and meal ideas that should appeal to both adults and children alike; to my mind this is much more useful. It seems to me that children need to, and can, eat the same as everyone else.

Why? Because it’s much less time-consuming for the person preparing the food if there is just one meal on the go. Who can dream up and prepare two different sets of good meals each day for any length of time? If you adopt this way of doing things, then something has to give. What happens more often than not is that one ‘real’ meal is prepared for the adults and the children end up with reheated processed junk. So it seems to me that if we want children to eat well in the long run, we need to get them accustomed to eating the same as everyone else as early as possible rather than feeding them differently.

This book also asks you to question the modern habit of feeding children on their own, not alongside adults at communal mealtimes. If we accept that children need ultimately to pick up eating patterns that will stand them in good stead for the rest of their lives, the quickest and most effortless way to achieve that is for them to share mealtimes with adults as often as possible. I am not saying that it is impossible for children to learn to eat well when they are eating on their own, just that it is considerably more difficult.

These days, as I discovered in the process of researching and writing this book, any insistence on some commitment – however small – to communal household eating is controversial. Although many parents want their children to eat well in the long term, in the short term they find it easier and more practical to feed them earlier and apart. Modern lifestyles have changed. The nuclear family no longer sits down around the table at five o’clock.

Please believe that, as a parent who has always worked, I am not suggesting we turn the clock back to the ‘good old days’ when Mummy was perpetually in the kitchen baking and didn’t go out to work. I do not want any parent – male or female – to feel a failure or traumatised with guilt because they do not bake their own bread or make their own pasta in the frantic ‘happy hour’ after they get in from work and attempt to deal with everything from seven-times tables to endlessly ringing phones. But I do still think that, although communal mealtimes may not be possible every day of the week, even if you can manage it some nights and not others it will help socialise children into liking and appreciating a wide variety of good food and provide an important model for eating which challenges the pressure to eat junk.

So, while advocating communal eating as the goal to try for, this book also recognises the stresses faced by busy, modern parents and offers practical strategies for making successful compromises. It offers a positive long-term philosophy which allows lots of room for individual variation, not a rigid set of rules which are broken at the first deviation from theory. Believe me, it is designed to make life easier for those looking after children, not harder.

You will notice that this book is not presented as a ‘healthy-eating’ manual for children. There are no recommendations to switch your kids on to skimmed milk, lower-fat crisps or diet yogurt, or to read nutrition labels or count calories.

Why? Obviously, one of the main reasons most parents want their children to eat better is that this will make them healthier, but if we are overly concerned with health there is a danger of becoming almost hung up about what we eat. We stop eating certain things because they are ‘bad’ for us and food becomes all about prohibitions and ‘what is good for you’. Even for adults, this type of thinking is a pleasure-killer and for children that feeling is more intense.

What’s more, this thinking is pointless because children can learn to enjoy fresh, wholesome, healthy food when it is presented to them in a positive way, mainly because it smells and tastes good in a way that junky children’s food never can. So the main rationale we give children for eating natural, wholesome food as opposed to junk has to be that it tastes better, not because it is ‘good for you’.

The concept of healthy eating is also much abused and often reinforces the paralysing modern notion that parents do not know how to feed their children any longer and so need help from ‘experts’ who provide ‘special foods’. But often these ‘experts’ are backed by powerful industry interests whose ‘advice’ is highly suspect. A lot of junk and heavily processed food these days can be presented as ‘healthy’ simply because it is low fat, despite the fact that it contains almost no useful nutrition. Thus a diet cola drink can actually come over as a healthy alternative to regular cola. But no cola drink has a place in any common-sense understanding of a wholesome diet.

The philosophy behind this book is that if you give your children food prepared from fresh raw materials in their natural, nutritious, unprocessed form, and encourage them to eat a wide selection of foods from all the major food groups, they will be eating healthily – end of story.

Most modern children do not eat this way. Their diet is top-heavy with protein, fat, refined carbohydrates, salt and sugar – a consequence of their dependence on processed foods. Their consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables is almost invariably far too low. ‘Eat more fresh fruit and vegetables’ is the one positive food message on which most nutritionists can agree and it’s the only modern health message on which parents really need to focus. So this book provides plenty of positive and effective strategies for getting children to like fruit and vegetables and increase their consumption of them.

But that is as far as conscious ‘healthy-eating’ guidance goes. The typical unbalanced children’s diet is a consequence of feeding children on a separate range of highly processed foods, which have been manufactured for profit rather than to retain their nutritional integrity. By drastically reducing the processed foods given to children and replacing them with wholesome unprocessed ones, parents can embrace healthy eating without getting embroiled in often-contradictory nutritional guidance.

So if you follow the real-food approach described in Part Two, you won’t get bogged down in whether that margarine has 15 or 50 per cent polyunsaturates. Instead, you’ll be concentrating on stimulating your children’s palate so that they enjoy a wide variety of fresh, unprocessed food, where pride of place is given to fruit and vegetables. If you do that, then you can afford to be laid-back about ‘healthy eating’.

This book is organised so readers can home in on the sections they find most useful. Part One examines the nature of the general problem we have on our hands now that so many children live on junk. You may find that it makes disquieting reading. Skip it, by all means, if you prefer, and move on to the rest of the book. Part Two, Breaking the Mould at Home, explains the general strategy for getting children to eat well. Part Three, The Gentle Art of Persuasion, is a troubleshooting section for when the general strategy doesn’t seem to work. Part Four explains how feeding babies can dovetail with this overall approach. Parts Five and Six offer practical strategies for sticky situations. Part Seven suggests ways of reinforcing your efforts, while Part Eight offers ideas to inspire you when you can’t see beyond the difficulties.

This book is an empowering one which offers parents the conviction that over time, and with a little bit of commitment, you can produce children who actively enjoy good wholesome food. Such a goal is both desirable and attainable. It will strengthen your resolve to trust your own common sense and good judgement and to be different from the pack, but it will also arm you with devices to cope with the ‘real world’ challenges faced by parents who want their children to eat well.

The motivation is not just the well-being of our children but the satisfaction that we parents can get from knowing that our children share with us a love of food and the pleasure of eating. When we are older and greyer, what a delight to drop in to a son or daughter for a home-cooked meal prepared from fresh, wholesome, unprocessed ingredients. And if there are grandchildren sitting around the table, too, all the better. If they learn, as their parents did, to appreciate real food, then our food chain will be so much safer in their hands.

PART ONE THE GHETTO OF ‘CHILDREN’S FOOD’

THE MODERN ‘CHILDREN’S DIET’

Let’s look at those distinctive foods that have become the mainstay of the modern British children’s diet. It won’t take long, because they are so very limited.

The backbone foods and drinks of the very restricted diet and their shortcomings
BREAKFAST CEREAL AND MILK

The typical ‘children’s cereal’ favourites consist of highly processed and over-refined grains stuck together with sugar in one form or another, and many are also high in salt. Prominent added vitamins give an aura of health but are only an attempt to replace the goodness that has been refined out of the processed grain. These are overwhelmingly sugary foods. The nutritional goodness of the milk (protein, calcium and vitamins) can’t compensate for that.

BURGERS

Mass-produced burgers of the type aimed at children have a very different composition from ones you might make at home. They tend to contain much more fat, and include a number of chemical additives to improve flavour and consistency. They are generally made with meat that represents the lowest common legal denominator in terms of cuts allowed and the source of the animals.

SAUSAGES AND SAUSAGE ROLLS

Similar objections to burgers except that the amount of meat is often lower and there are more chemical additives. Sausage rolls have an additional layer of fatty pastry which makes them even less healthy. They are often served inadequately reheated from frozen and this, combined with the poor quality of the meat, makes them a likely food poisoning source.

POULTRY OR FISH IN BREADCRUMBS

Any food in breadcrumbs is automatically much fattier than its unbreaded equivalent because the coating holds fat, even when it is grilled rather than fried. Apart from whole fillets of poultry or fish, the minced poultry meat in products such as Kievs and nuggets represents a very low-grade mulch of intensively produced meat, held together with chemical additives. They seem cheap but they represent poor value for money given the ingredients used.

FISH FINGERS

Many contain just a fish and additive sludge. Some more expensive fish fingers do contain only fish fillets – even if this is at a vastly inflated price – but they are a less healthy alternative to a plain fillet because of the coating.

CHIPS

A very fatty food, even oven or lower-fat chips. Processing can result in a loss of vitamins.

TINNED BAKED BEANS

Beans offer useful fibre, some protein and beneficial vitamins. But tinned versions usually contain surprisingly large amounts of sugar and salt. This makes them less healthy than we might think.

TINNED TOMATO SOUP

The healthy nutrition offered by the tomatoes is outweighed, or at least cancelled out, by the unhealthy amounts of sugar. Another ‘savoury’ food that is usually surprisingly sweet.

PIZZA

A disc of highly refined bread dough with a very thin smear of sweetened tomato concentrate and some rubbery processed cheese, most kid’s pizzas are temporarily filling but low on any positively beneficial ingredients.

SWEETS

Children’s chocolate confectionery is basically a mixture of chemically hardened vegetable fats, vast amounts of sugar and small amounts of cocoa solids, with chemical flavourings. Fruity sweets consist mainly of sugar, mixed with sometimes natural but mainly chemical flavourings, colourings and other additives.

BISCUITS

Typical children’s biscuits consist overwhelmingly of highly refined flour, generous quantities of sugar and chemically hardened vegetable fat. Healthier-seeming versions prominently featuring ingredients such as oats and dried fruits often contain even more sugar than the standard biscuit and surprisingly large amounts of fat.

CRISPS AND EXTRUDED SNACKS

Crisps are both fatty and high in salt. Flavoured ones nearly always contain chemical additives and sweeteners in various forms, too. They are not filling and offer little good nutrition, so they will leave a hungry child dissatisfied and most probably thirsty, too.

Extruded snacks come in shapes such as hoops, flying saucers or wafers, not slices. They are called extruded because they are made from a mixture of dehydrated potato, starches, emulsifiers and a number of chemical additives which is forced out (extruded) in a particular shape. They tend to contain even more additives than crisps.

FIZZY DRINKS

These are basically water that has been carbonated and then flavoured with artificial – or occasionally natural – flavourings. They also contain other chemical additives such as colourings and huge amounts of sugar or smaller amounts of chemical sweeteners. The routine presence of certain chemical preservatives and flavourings is now being linked to allergic reactions of all sorts, but particularly oral disease causing puffy lips, mouths and swollen jaws. These drinks contain nothing that is beneficial for health; instead they include ingredients that are known to attack good health. A typical can of cola contains the equivalent of seven teaspoons of white sugar. Drinks with sweeteners may have fewer calories and won’t attack tooth enamel but some scientists believe sweeteners may pose a risk to health.

SQUASH

Squash in its many forms often presents a healthy image based around the goodness of fruit. Some do contain real fruit juice in very small quantities but otherwise their ingredients are similar to fizzy drinks, just without the carbon dioxide, and the same objections apply. Even when considerably diluted, they can acustom children to a level of sweetness that makes ‘real’ drinks seem unpalatable by comparison.

ICE CREAM

The more expensive ‘premium’ ice creams contain a lot of fat in the form of cream and a lot of sugar but there is some nutritional goodness to be had from the non-sugar ingredients and they are fairly naturally made. Cheaper ice creams aimed at children, however, are highly synthetic concoctions of air, water, milk powder, hardened vegetable fat and lots of sugar blended together with chemical emulsifiers, stabilisers, colourings and flavourings.

The slightly wider range of popular children’s foods and their limitations
APPLES AND BANANAS

These are really nutritious foods and it is good that children eat them but they are the only fruits that many children eat. If they are given them all the time, they may get bored with them and decide they don’t like fruit in general.

FROZEN PEAS AND SWEETCORN

Frozen vegetables are a useful and nutritious stand-by. But peas and sweetcorn both taste quite sweet. Children need to get used to a range of vegetables with different flavours, such as the tartness of a fresh tomato, the refreshing quality of cucumber and the pepperiness of watercress.

TOAST

Toast is only as good as the quality of the basic bread and what you put on it. Most mass-produced British bread is pappy, light and insubstantial. It takes many slices of this sort of bread to fill you up because it fails to satisfy. Children may be spreading fats or jams on each slice, so when several slices are being eaten, the fats and sugars in the spreads can easily dwarf any goodness to be had from the bread.

YOGURT AND FROM AGE FRAIS

A straightforward natural yogurt or fromage frais, flavoured with fruit purée, is a healthy and nutritious food but most children’s versions have so much sugar or artificial sweetener in them that they need to be thought of as puddings. A thick fruit compote layer can be surprisingly sweet, and it’s now common for crunchy, sweet additions to be sold as part of a yogurt or fromage frais dessert. Cheaper types often contain no fruit, just chemical fruit flavours. Some that do contain fresh fruit routinely include chemical preservatives, which are not beneficial for health (see page 120).

If we let children eat almost exclusively from this typical range of children’s food, what does their diet amount to? We can sum it up as consisting overwhelmingly of processed foods composed of:

• lots of protein

• lots of refined carbohydrate or starchy food

• lots of fat, sugar and salt.

Fruit and vegetables are almost entirely missing or under-represented.

This is more or less the opposite of what children should be eating for good health. Though there is still surprisingly little consensus on what constitutes a ‘healthy’ diet, most nutritionists would agree from various perspectives that this classic children’s diet is a disaster.

With its almost total absence of fruit and vegetables – the key category of food that all nutritionists think is healthy – and its heavy reliance on refined carbohydrate, sugar and fat, not to mention the excessive amounts of protein, the typical children’s diet seems to be incompatible with long-term good health.

This modern form of malnutrition, learned in childhood and very likely carried on into adulthood, is clearly implicated heavily in the growing prevalence of obesity. It is also increasingly viewed as a strong contributory factor in a surprisingly wide range of illnesses, from heart disease to cancer. If our children continue to eat this way, the prognosis for the nation’s health looks very gloomy.

For parents who feel they can’t live with that thought, Parts Two to Four of this book concentrate on practical ways to break out of the children’s junk-food ghetto. Healthier Look-alike Alternatives to Common ‘Children’s Foods’ (pages 114–19) points you in the direction of foods that have the appeal of junk for children but are healthier and more natural.

‘PICKY-EATER’ CULTURE

These days, more adults than ever before seem to have inordinate difficulty getting their children to eat a reasonably wide range of good, wholesome food. Why do we live in a land where children seem drawn only to food that is bad for them?

It’s a curious modern phenomenon. British and American children seem to be bonded by a common culture that fosters resistance to good food. They stand out from children in other parts of the world with more traditional food cultures, even Europe. Most Italians would throw up their hands in horror at the very idea of a child who would not eat vegetables. In the UK we shrug our shoulders and say, reluctantly, that this is normal. In France, sales of crisps rely on adults serving them with drinks as an aperitif. It would be an eye-opener to most French people to witness the hordes of U K schoolchildren walking to and from school with bags of crisps and fizzy drinks. In fact it seems that wherever Anglo-American food culture becomes strong, a liking for junk food and a problematic attitude towards good food follow. Within this type of food culture there has been a population explosion of ‘picky eaters’. When once the infamous picky eaters were the exception, now they are the rule.

How can this be? There are lots of theories ploughing both sides of the nature-nurture divide. One belief is that junk food is basically so appealing that once children have tasted it that is all they will want: it is just a matter of time until those other traditional food countries follow suit.

Listen to the powerful transnational companies that run the food industry and you might believe that it had absolutely nothing to do with creating those modern legions of picky eaters. They say that they are simply servicing a need for popular food. If children are eating badly, then that is their parents’ fault for not balancing their diet. There is no such thing as an unhealthy food, they tell us, just an unhealthy diet.

Working mothers are another ‘usual suspect’, often asked to carry the can for children’s deteriorating food habits. We are told that because women now work (in three out of every five families where the parents are married, women have jobs), this has led to the erosion of family meals and real food in favour of more convenient processed food. So grazing has taken over from three square meals, leading to ever more reliance on anything that is quick to prepare and comes in single units of food that can be eaten as required. Junk food fits the bill.

All these theories are basically fatalistic about children’s susceptibility to junk and treat it as a fact of modern life – no turning the clock back. When forced to face up to the consequences of this thinking in the form of the millions of children who now fit the picky-eater description, there is a general wringing of hands. Helpful responses come in the form of quick techno-fixes. Okay, your children don’t want to eat breakfast, so we have created breakfast bars. The fact that they are stuck together with sugar is neither here nor there.

This sort of logic is invidious and, in the long term, does nothing to help either children or the adults trying to feed them. The reality is that nowadays we live in a culture where the prevailing conditions are all going against children eating well, and the dominant expectations lead children to conform to a depressingly limited food stereotype – whether or not their parents go out to work.

The existence of major structural factors described elsewhere in this book, like rapacious advertising targeted at children and an absence of real food education, means that parents (working or otherwise) who want their children to eat well are up against it. No surprise that many of us just go with the flow and give in to negative thinking. We almost expect to have problems feeding our children before we even begin.

Despite these very tangible structural obstacles, however, there is still considerable scope for winning back children to the delights of good food. The prospects for feeding children in a better, more wholesome way are nowhere near as bleak as made out.

Yes, all children are different and there is the odd child – even a significant minority of children – who does seem to conform naturally to that picky-eater stereotype. But there is also a huge middle ground of children who, if the conditions are right, will eat something approximating to a wide-ranging and basically wholesome diet. Some children will even actively seek it out, surprising us with their adventurousness and ability to revel in the pleasures of food and the rituals of eating.

For adults who do not want to give in to the prevailing determinism that writes off children’s food prospects, Parts Two to Six of this book give workable strategies for creating the conditions in which children can learn to eat well.

PARENTS’ ATTITUDES

Some older parents realise that their children’s diet is very different from what they ate when they were young and feel anxious about that. Other younger parents think it’s normal for children to live on junky processed foods because that is how they were brought up. Either way, separate ‘children’s food’ is so ubiquitous that many parents find ways of rationalising the misgivings they might have. Let’s examine some commonly expressed points of view and consider more positive and optimistic alternatives.

The ‘concerned and worried but’ parent

‘I’m worried that the kids eat such a limited and unhealthy diet but I let them get into bad habits years ago and now they are a lost cause.’

It’s true that it is harder to wean children on to good eating habits when they already have bad ones but it is perfectly possible. All the strategies mentioned in Part Two, Breaking the Mould at Home, can work with older children provided they are introduced gradually. Pages 61–6, Getting the Message Across, suggest tactics (bad-mouthing junk, cashing in on concern over appearance) that work, especially with older children.

‘I am relying on childcarers to feed my child on weekdays. It’s hard to control what the children eat.’

This is not an insurmountable problem. Read What You Can Expect from Childcarers, pages 169–75.

‘I’d like the children to eat better but when I try, I find it hard to keep it up.’

Like anything else you really want to do, encouraging children to have good, wide-ranging eating habits does require some staying power and commitment. Parts Two and Three outline various ways to overcome common pitfalls and hurdles.

‘Even if my children eat well at home, I meet a brick wall at school/nursery where junk is accepted as normal.’

The food that children eat at home is going to be the most formative type they get and you can largely control that. Don’t worry too much about what goes on outside the house but read Part Five, Influencing What Children Eat When You’re Not There, for solutions in outside situations.

‘How can I make my kids eat well without making both them and myself stand out as weird and awkward?’

Explain to children from an early age why they eat some food and not others so that they understand and feel confident about that. Prepare them diplomatically for situations outside the house where they will be making a different choice from other children in the group. Part Five, Influencing What Children Eat When You’re Not There, suggests how you can do that.

‘If I take a tough line on junk and restrict it, won’t that make them react and go the wrong way?’

There’s so much commercial pressure on children to eat junk that if you don’t take a stand they will almost certainly conform to that pressure. Children need to hear an overt ‘real-food’ message. However, it is important not to get involved with ‘banning’ foods or appearing to deprive children of treats. Part Two, Breaking the Mould at Home, Part Three, The Gentle Art of Persuasion, and pages 91–5, Sweets, Treats and Bans, all explain how to get that balance.

‘No matter how hard I try, my children reject food and I can’t stand the fights any more.’

Head-on confrontations are a no-no. Perhaps you’re going about it in the wrong way. Read Part Three, The Gentle Art of Persuasion.

The philosophical parent

‘Children are picky eaters naturally, it’s to be expected.’

A self-fulfilling prophecy that has been promoted by the food industry, which makes a mint out of selling children junk. Children in most parts of the world eat what adults eat. It’s mainly in the UK and North America that children are considered to need a different diet. If you keep on presenting them with real food they will learn to like it. If you stereotype them as picky eaters, then that is what they will become.

‘Better the kids eat junk than nothing at all.’

This is very short-term thinking. The more you offer children junk, the less likely they’ll be to accept real food in the long term. Part Three, The Gentle Art of Persuasion, suggests how to encourage children to eat something decent without having head-on fights. Children won’t starve; they will eventually eat something worthwhile if you adopt the approach outlined in Part Two, Breaking the Mould at Home.

‘It’s okay to eat junk as long as they exercise.’

Children can burn up a lot of energy and work off an unhealthy diet to a certain extent, but however fit and active they might appear, they are being deprived of vital nutrients if they live on junk. Children brought up on junk will very likely turn into adults who may be less physically active. These unbalanced eating habits will catch up with them in later life. They need to learn wide-ranging and wholesome eating patterns which will see them through into a ripe old age.

‘Surely in moderation junk is okay?’

In theory, if a child eats well generally then the odd packet of sweets or crisps is not a problem. But it is very easy for the proportion of junk to creep up so that it is actually much more significant in their total diet than parents realise. And how do you draw the line between moderate amounts of junk and too much? A better approach is to say that, in general, children aren’t given junk foods except on the very odd occasion and that they are always offered an attractive alternative. For ideas read Part Eight, Nitty-Gritty Ideas and Recipes for Inspiration.

The parent who accepts junk food

‘I’m not worried. The kids will learn to like better food as adults. After all, I did.’

It is theoretically possible that a child will spontaneously find a love of good food as an adult but it is much more likely that he or she will simply become an adult who lives on junk. It’s true that parents generally eat more adventurously than their children, but adults with sophisticated tastes may have forgotten that their diet as children, though limited, was nowhere near as limited as the modern child’s, and that they ate with adults, not apart.

‘Good food is wasted on children.’

Another self-fulfilling prophecy. Children learn to like what they are given. If they are given only junk, then this is what they will learn to like and expect. If you follow this approach to its logical extreme, you will only ever feed your children on processed junk. Is that what you really want? Besides, it’s vital that children learn to like real food if they are to be properly nourished – so rather than being wasted on them it’s a priority that they have it.

‘I don’t have time to feed my kids on anything but processed children’s foods, and communal eating doesn’t ft in with our lifestyle.’

Fine, but can you live with the fact that your children will end up living on an imbalanced diet which will not provide the nutrients they need? It isn’t necessarily any more time-consuming to give them real food in any case.

‘It’s normal for children to eat junk. They nearly all do and they aren’t dead yet.’

This phenomenon is widespread only in the UK and North America. Children in other countries still overwhelmingly eat real food. A large body of scientific research now suggests that a diet high in fat, protein, salt and sugar and deficient in fruit and vegetables (the typical ‘children’s diet’) is implicated in health problems that attack us in adult life – cancer, heart disease, diabetes etc.

THE ROT BEGINS WITH THOSE LITTLE JARS

When we try to trace the origins of how children’s diet became the junk-food ghetto that it is today, the trail starts with the modern idea that their food should somehow be separate from the general food supply. This mindset kicks in with baby food.

Baby-food manufacturers assure parents that their products are ‘specially formulated for your baby’, but such foods would be more accurately described as ‘specially formulated to con parents into believing that they can’t feed children by themselves’. This hidden agenda, of course, is never made explicit.

Nowadays, manufacturers realise that they must pay lip service to the idea that their baby foods are not intended to replace home-prepared food and that they are just a safe, handy convenience for the ‘busy mum’. But by clever labelling, which first raises anxieties then appears to allay them, they implicitly perpetuate the false idea that parents somehow lack the nutritional knowledge to prepare baby food themselves. They undermine our confidence about feeding our babies on variations of the household food supply that we ourselves eat, even though this was, after all, the common-sense and highly practical way that parents fed their children until quite recently.

How does this work?

We start to make decisions about how our children will eat from day one. The first issue is whether to breastfeed or use formula milk in a bottle. On this one there is widespread agreement: try to breastfeed if you can but, failing that, it’s fine to fall back on formula milk.

When breastfeeding goes well, it is simple, natural and rewarding. There are no worries about sterilising teats and bottles, no tricky temperature judging, no need to work your way through the formula milks on sale to find the one your baby accepts.

When breastfeeding doesn’t work out, the routine preparation of formula and all that it entails can seem like light relief after sore nipples, frustration and a dissatisfied baby. Parents who actively choose formula milk or who just end up using it know that this milk has been specially formulated to be as similar to breast milk as possible. We have been told that it is not good enough simply to give our offspring any old milk, be that cow’s, goat’s, sheep’s or even soya, because in its standard form it has not been adapted for the sensitive digestive systems of human infants.

Such advice is, of course, sensible and accurate. If we can’t feed babies on nature’s intended breast milk, we must rely on commercial companies, their scientists and nutritionists, to devise formulas that give them all they need to grow and won’t upset them or spark off allergies. It’s a complicated business and we must leave it in the hands of the experts.

But thereafter, if we want our children to grow up to be adults who eat well – adults with wide-ranging tastes who enjoy food and self-select nutritious food – we need to draw a line under the food industry’s scientific ‘advice’. From the time that we introduce the first weaning foods, usually in that critical and often challenging time when our baby is four to six months old, we do not need to rely routinely on commercial baby foods any more than we need to employ a food taster to check that our food hasn’t been poisoned. Instead, we need to view all those little jars and packets with a healthy cynicism.

Why? Like formula milk, many weaning foods give the impression that there is something special about them, that they are foods devised by knowledgeable nutritionists and doctors. Obviously, manufacturers have a direct interest in fostering this impression. In 1998 the British baby-food market was worth almost £164,000 million, and it is growing each year. So food manufacturers make a lot of money supplying parents with foods they think they cannot make themselves.

But unlike formula milk, which is a carefully devised product, commercial baby foods are nothing special. Though there are a few high-quality exceptions, most commercial baby foods represent nothing more than bulk-bought ingredients that have been heavily processed.

So when we buy ‘baby apple’ for example, naive and lacking in confidence as many parents are, we may fondly think that the apples therein are somehow superior to apples that we might use ourselves. Just because the jar contains apples for babies, it seems safer and more trustworthy than any apple equivalent we might prepare ourselves. The very existence of baby-food apples may even make us feel, quite wrongly, that we are not capable of producing our own version.

Yet the reality is that, with the exception of organic brands, most commercial baby-food apples are sourced in bulk from the general supply of apples destined for processing. Far from being the pick of the crop, they might just as well be turning up in a commercial apple pie or a ready-made apple sauce. The poor little baby consumers didn’t get any special deal here.

This example highlights the main shortcomings of most commercial brands of baby foods, which are:

• The raw ingredients are nothing special; they are sourced from undistinguished bulk ingredients destined for processing.

• These ingredients will be processed on an industrial scale to extend their shelf life. This destroys much of the natural goodness in them and makes it necessary to introduce additives, such as synthetic vitamins, that would not be necessary in home-made versions.

• Heavy processing and the adulteration of raw ingredients with industrial additives produce food that is bland, samey and lacks the palette of flavours found in real, home-produced foods. Babies who start out on this limited range of flavours may find it hard to make the transition to the flavour of fresh food.

• They represent poor value for money. Commercial baby foods work out infinitely more expensive than home-made equivalents. You pay a high price for the convenience and the ingredients will definitely be less fresh and often of lower quality than those you might use at home.

But what about all those reassuring ‘tick lists’? Don’t they promise nutritional standards far above anything that can be produced at home?

The answer is no. The purpose of these lists is to inspire confidence in the adult buying the food. On typical commercial baby foods, the strategy is to dazzle you with ticks that make a virtue of the obvious by simply stressing the basic qualities that all baby food should have anyway.

A classic tick list, on those baby apples again, might read, ‘No added sugar, no artificial flavours, no artificial colours, no added preservatives, no added salt, suitable for vegetarians, gluten-free, milk-free’. You don’t have to be a nutritionist to figure out that you don’t normally put salt in apple purée any more than you would include any of the other tick-listed items.

Although tick lists seem to be helpful and to offer more information about the product, a tick list like this on baby apples is, viewed charitably, beside the point. Sometimes it is downright confusing. Take the question of prominent added vitamins. Some parents actually stop making food for their babies because they worry that it won’t have as many vitamins as commercial brands. In fact, home-made baby food is likely to retain more vitamins than over-processed commercial gloop, and these will be in a natural form which is much better for babies on wider health grounds.

On the more complicated multi-ingredient foods, the actively misleading effect of tick lists is to inspire confidence while drawing attention away from the ingredients (usually industrial bulking ingredients and water) that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Other apparently confidence-inspiring claims still give baby-food manufacturers plenty of room for manoeuvre. For example, a ‘No artificial colours/flavours/thickeners’ claim still allows for the inclusion of natural colours, flavours and thickeners. Though these may be preferable in some ways to their synthetic equivalents, they cannot be taken as positively beneficial. If the food was good quality and made from excellent ingredients to start with, such additives – natural or synthetic – would not be necessary. Similarly a prominent ‘No added sugar’ claim can still go on a food that contains sweet ingredients such as fruit juice.

To put it bluntly, babies who start out life on these foods are simply eating very ordinary processed food – with all the shortcomings that has – packaged so as to play on our confusion about healthy eating and our anxieties about how best to feed our children. That’s precisely the kind of product that babies and parents can live without. If we want our babies to grow into children, then adults, who appreciate a wide range of wholesome food, the regular use of commercial baby food is a block to that process. So if you don’t want your children to go into the black tunnel that leads from processed baby food to processed children’s junk, Part Four, Getting It Right with Babies and Toddlers, tells you all you really need to know about preparing your own (which can be as simple as mashing a banana or grating an apple). It also explains how to read between the lines on food labels and select the best ready-made baby food when you need it as a back-up for home-made.

STAGGERED EATING

Family mealtimes, we are told, are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Gone are the days when Mum was at home all day to cook and Dad waltzed in just in time to carve the meat. Nowadays, family meals are being replaced by a new phenomenon – staggered eating, where everyone eats at different times. At the extreme, we hear of households where adults and children take it in turns to use the microwave so they can reheat an individual meal of their preference, selected from a stock of ready meals and convenience foods which is replenished at the supermarket every week or ten days. The less extreme, but increasingly common, phenomenon is the two-shift mealtime, where the children are fed earlier, usually between 5 and 6 pm, and the adults eat together later, any time from 7 pm onwards.

We are not just talking about babies here. Obviously they have to be put down to sleep when they are tired and are just too small to wait for food without becoming desperate. But according to a survey carried out by the Observer newspaper in 1998, almost half of children aged seven to fourteen do not eat a regular evening meal with the adults in their household either.

Separate children’s meals are a major departure from tradition, a relatively recent phenomenon that has probably developed out of modern working patterns. Modern adults are tired after a long day out at work, or worn out by an even longer day looking after progressively more grizzly children without the backup of an extended family. Most people eat their main meal in the evening, but longer working days for those in employment dictate that they get home late and it can be difficult or impractical to keep fractious children up and waiting for food that long. And, of course, we positively yearn for quiet adult time, to enjoy some food and a drink with a little peace and quiet – and who can blame us?

But imagine the dispiriting solitariness of separate children’s mealtimes from a child’s point of view. Children’s tea or supper generally takes place at their rattiest time of day, the infamous ‘happy hour’ between 5 and 6 pm. They are presented with food by an adult who is generally hurrying to get on to the next chore. It is likely to be served in a fast-track manner – at a table, if the adults still have traditional leanings, or more commonly on a plate on the lap in front of the television. The table is not set as it would be to mark the ritual of communal mealtimes and the expectations that go along with that, and the adults don’t sit down with the children to share the experience.

Children who eat on their own are the most isolated of the lot, while those with brothers and sisters can at least keep each other company. But in the absence of adults who would otherwise act as socialising centrepoints, almost like a master of ceremonies, the whole business is not a lot of fun.

And then there’s the food itself. If adults are basically focusing on something more interesting and ‘adult’ to be consumed after the children have eaten, it’s obvious that the children’s meal is at best secondary in their efforts and, very often, an irritating afterthought whose necessity, day after day, becomes somewhat oppressive.

The results are all too familiar. Put bluntly, when staggered eating becomes the norm it is highly likely that the children of the house will end up eating poorer-quality, less wholesome and healthy food than the adults. This is because thinking up two different evening meals a day is soul-destroying and so adults almost invariably fall back on a repertoire of recognised ‘children’s foods’ which can be served earlier. These tend to rely on ready-prepared processed foods, the freezer and the microwave, and lack the ‘feel-good’ qualities of freshly prepared real food that might lead the child by the nose to eat what’s on the plate.

For the child, food becomes routine and dull and eating it is pretty unrewarding. Because there is no special ritual around serving it – such as setting the table, or the gathering together of everyone in the house – the meal is indistinguishable, from a child’s point of view, from casual snacks. So it’s very easy for the child to view it as just more ‘take it or leave it’ food. It may even simply come over as an annoying distraction from other more involving activities such as playing, doing homework or fighting with siblings. The net effect is that the child eats unsatisfactorily: quickly and without pleasure.

For the adult, the whole interaction becomes more and more problematic and emotionally highly charged, as she or he reaches the conclusion that this is not just a picky eater but a child who eats hardly anything. That makes the prospect of ever integrating the child into more adult eating patterns even more bleak, and the apparent impossibility of doing so becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Guilt and frustration build up in equal measure in the adult, until the only ‘escape’ is a retreat into cynicism of the ‘all kids eat junk and that is just normal’ variety.

If we want children to eat well, staggered eating is a total block to achieving that goal. So once we get beyond the baby and toddler stage, when they are too tired at the end of the day to wait up to eat, it is important to try to hold on to some notion of communal eating and family mealtimes. We may not be able to do that at every meal, or even every other meal, but every bit helps.

Yes, women do work and people arrive home later than in the past, but it is still possible to establish the principle that children and adults mainly share the same food. In the long term, if we want children to like good food, eating together is the easiest way to achieve that, saving us fights, frustration and guilt. For ideas about making this work in practice, see Eating Together and Why It Matters (pages 74–7).

SWEETS AS FOOD

Children have been eating sugary and chocolaty sweets for as long as any of us can remember. A love of sweet snacks in all forms is a regular feature of childhood.

Many adults remember with great fondness the thrill of having money to spend in the sweet shop and the lure of everything from penny caramels to sherbet flying saucers.

However, the way we think about sweets has changed. We used to think of them as a different category of edible – a treat, perhaps, a bit of frivolous window-dressing after the main business of eating had been concluded. Very few people would have considered them to be a substitute for a child’s mainstream nutrition. Nowadays, however, sweets are increasingly considered the main event. It is not uncommon, for example, for children to be given a chocolaty candy bar in their lunch boxes, often as an alternative to a pudding such as yogurt or fresh fruit. In 1998 when the caterer Gardner Merchant surveyed children’s eating habits, it found that 39 per cent of children brought a chocolate bar to school in their lunch box.

It seems that sweet confectionery is increasingly being given to children as a staple part of their diet. We no longer expect them to fill up on ‘proper’ food, offering sweets as an add-on, but often rely on confectionery as food itself. The survey mentioned above also found that one in four children substituted sweets, crisps and savoury snacks for their traditional hot evening meal.

This shift in thinking has a lot to do with the power of advertising, particularly on television. Sweets are ruthlessly hyped to children through advertising which makes them desire them. Once they taste sweets, they do like them because the hefty serving of sugar, salt, and fat they offer can be irresistible, encouraging a palate that seeks that instant fix in other foods. Judged against this craving, real, natural, unprocessed foods just don’t taste right and, unlike the commercial might of the confectionery industry, they don’t have any powerful interests promoting them.

Most people know that, eaten in significant quantity, sweets and chocolate confectionery are bad for children’s health. If parents don’t intervene, the sheer weight of commercial pressure on children to eat confectionery is so strong that they will end up eating much more than the relatively harmless quantity of ‘add-on’ sweets we often associate with our own childhood.

The dilemma for worried parents is how to discourage consumption of sugary confectionery without appearing to ban or proscribe it, especially because it is such a big component of the ubiquitous children’s diet. However, despite the pressure on children to want confectionery – and to replace other more wholesome foods with it – they can be influenced to restrict or severely limit consumption of their own volition.

How can parents achieve this?

We need to start approaching the problem not in a futile ‘Sweets are bad, you aren’t allowed them’ way but as part of an overall strategy towards eating, outlined in detail elsewhere in this book, that will encourage children to select food that is nutritious and good for them. The objective – a surprisingly achievable goal – is to produce children who will happily eat their Clementine or yogurt when the rest of the class is munching away on fatty-sugary sweets.

Parents can achieve this by using the general approach outlined in Part Two, Breaking the Mould at Home, which is aimed at producing children who, of their own accord, will enjoy a wide range of food and select a diet that is broadly wholesome and good for them. Part Three, The Gentle Art of Persuasion, is a troubleshooting section to help parents who find it hard to make the approach in Part Two stick. Part Seven, Nitty-gritty Ideas and Recipes for Inspiration, lists wholesome foods that can be offered in specific situations as an alternative to confectionery and other junk food. Finally, for a strategy that tackles the vexed question of sweets head-on, see pages 91–5, Sweets, Treats and Bans.

CRISP CRAZY

Just as sweets have become a significant part of many children’s diet, so consumption of crisps and crunchy, puffy ‘extruded snacks’ amongst children has grown to unprecedented levels.

Children eat crisps on the way to school, at breaktime, for lunch, for afternoon snack, instead of tea or at supper. No school playground, high street or urban green space is free from discarded crisp packets blowing in the wind. Many children will eat at least a packet each day.

When the caterer Gardner Merchant surveyed children’s eating habits in 1998, it found that 20 per cent of schoolchildren bought crisps or savoury (extruded) snacks on their way home from school each day. Crisps and savoury snacks were also the most common item in a packed lunch box: 57 per cent of children ate them for packed lunch while the more traditional meat or cheese sandwich trailed at 38 and 37 per cent respectively. Such habits are regarded as normal.

Ironically, crisps seem to have taken on a misleadingly ‘healthy’ profile amongst some parents and children. They are commonly seen as a healthier option than sweets because they are savoury and are made from potatoes or corn – both wholesome starchy foods. For many children who won’t accept other savoury food such as a sandwich, filled roll or salad, crisps are routinely offered as an acceptable alternative. But the reality is that although potatoes – and, to a lesser extent, corn – are a wholesome food that children can be encouraged to eat in some quantity, crisps, and even more so extruded snacks, are not.

Here’s why:

• They are fatty:

100 grams of boiled potato contain only 0.1 milligrams of fat.

100 grams of regular crisps contain 37.6 milligrams of fat.

100 grams of ‘low-fat’ crisps contain 21.5 grams of fat.

‘Low-fat’ crisps are a contradiction in terms: crisps and extruded snacks are always fatty foods.

• They are salty:

100 grams of boiled potato contain 7 milligrams of sodium.

100 grams of regular or ‘low-fat’ crisps contain 1,070 milligrams of sodium.

No wonder they make children extremely thirsty.

• They are sweet:

Although saltiness is the first flavour that hits you when you eat crisps, all but the most basic salted crisps contain sugar or artificial sweeteners to give flavour. Children eat too much of the former anyway and there are health concerns over the safety of the latter (see pages 6–7).

• They often contain undesirable additives:

Many extruded snacks contain monosodium glutamate, for example, a chemical flavour enhancer that has been widely linked to allergic reactions in sensitive people. Acidity regulators are routinely used to balance the other chemical flavourings in crisps. Additives such as these have no benefits for health whatsoever and increase the total intake of unnecessary chemicals that children eat – an intake that many health experts would like to see reduced.

• They usually contain chemical flavourings:

These totally synthetic flavourings are presumed safe on very thin scientific grounds because there is, as yet, no evidence that they cause harm. However, the long-term toxicological effects on modern children – who may nowadays get a surprisingly large cocktail of them – have not been studied.

• They may contain chemical or natural colour. These can cause allergic and other reactions in some people.

To sum up the nutritional contents of all those bag snacks, they represent a large dose of everything you don’t want children to eat and a very small amount of anything you might want them to eat. The nutritional goodness of any reasonably wholesome ingredient – such as potatoes, corn or wheat – is totally dwarfed by fat, salt, sweet flavourings and undesirable industrial additives.

But as well as being nutritionally unbalanced, the larger-than-life, mouth-mugging qualities of crisps and extruded snacks have a pernicious effect on young tastebuds, accustoming them to hefty servings of that all-too-familiar fat/salt/sugar trilogy so omnipresent in junk food. A taste for this will certainly distort the palate and reduce a child’s ability to appreciate real, natural food that lacks these heavy-handed artificial tastes. Just as we would find it unpleasant to drink orange juice after brushing our teeth, so children accustomed to the taste effect of crisps and other junk food will find it harder to like or appreciate a wider range of more subtle, straightforward, untampered-with flavours.

Despite the poor nutrition they offer, and the junk-food palate they are likely to encourage, crisps and extruded snacks have become the ubiquitous ‘savoury’ convenience foods for children. They are cheap, though not necessarily good value for money, and they keep for ages. Pre-wrapped and easily opened, they are the lazy alternative to a more wholesome snack that might need to be prepared at home. When we are tired or under pressure, it’s very easy just to pop that bag of crisps into the schoolbag rather than filling a roll or even washing an apple.

However, if we want our children to grow up to be adults who like wholesome, natural food and appreciate a wide range of flavours, crisps and extruded snacks are one significant category in the modern ‘children’s diet’ they are much better off without. An occasional bag of crisps is not a cause for concern. But if children are eating them every day, sometimes twice a day, and eating them in preference to good food, then they can become a problem.

That is why it is best to strike these bag snacks off your routine shopping list and turn instead to Twenty-five Good Snacks (pages 237–8), which lists alternatives that appeal to many children. For alternative packed lunch ideas, see Ten Good Packed Lunches (pages 259–62)

THE FLICKERING SCREEN

We are tired, the children are crotchety and we need to get on with some essential tasks, so we switch on the television to give us some breathing space. But as we buy ourselves some peace and relative quiet we may, without knowing it, be storing up problems when it comes to getting our children to eat a decent, wholesome diet.

We may begin to find that, even from the youngest age, when we try to give them water the children start demanding a sweetened fizzy drink. No matter how tempting the contents of our fruit bowl, we may see them gravitating towards the biscuit tin or demanding money to visit the sweet shop. We find ourselves wondering why they won’t eat anything made with fish, unless it’s coated in crispy crumb or formed into a special marine ‘shape’. When we buy the more traditional, unsticky breakfast cereals, we find them campaigning for the latest brand that’s stuck together with sugar and other sweet ingredients. Where do these demands come from?

Before you subscribe to the prevalent attitude that all children just naturally and spontaneously want to eat junk, consider first the pressure that emanates from that flickering screen. We need look no further than the diet of food ads served up on children’s prime-time television, which consists of little more than what some researchers call ‘an onslaught of junk-food hype’.

In 1996 the independent watchdog, Consumers International, surveyed the type of food advertising during peak children’s television hours in thirteen countries: eleven in Europe plus the USA and Australia. In the UK it found that children see seventeen adverts each hour and ten of these are for food or drink – the highest number of food and drink ads in any European country.

A massive 95 per cent of these ads were for unhealthy foods, high in fat, sugar or salt. Top of the food ad pops in the UK came confectionery, with breakfast cereals following a close second. By comparison, ads for foods that most people would agree should be encouraged, such as fruit and vegetables, were almost non-existent. The only remotely healthy ads that British children are likely to see on television are for frozen peas.

Consumers International’s survey confirms the findings of another carried out in 1995 by the National Food Alliance. This also concluded that advertising during programmes appealing to children presented a grossly unbalanced nutritional message with fatty and sugary foods predominating.

This imbalance matters particularly because children are less able than adults to understand the intent of advertising or its persuasive techniques and are therefore less able to treat it with scepticism. The younger the child, the more vulnerable she or he is to swallowing an advertising message uncritically. A 1996 UK government report reiterated what other researchers have found – that children have difficulty distinguishing television advertisements from the programmes surrounding them. At the most television-dependent age of three to four, when it is a boon to plonk down your offspring in front of the television while you get on with other things, it is unlikely that they can differentiate between the two. It is now thought that it is only after the age of ten to twelve that children realise that the purpose of advertisements is to persuade you to buy things. This confusion is compounded by the use of characters or personalities popular with children which appear to endorse the product in the child’s eyes. Whether it’s cuddly, collectable free gifts with characters from the latest cartoon blockbuster or a cute little familiar face on that pot of fromage frais, such images exploit children’s gullibility.

Obviously advertising isn’t the only message that influences what children eat. The advertising industry says that its critics ignore the role of families and education in helping children make healthy choices. When that familiar ‘Can we buy that?’ plea follows the ad, the advertising industry expects us to take the time to explain patiently to our children how that sticky cereal or fatty snack isn’t very healthy unless it’s part of a ‘balanced diet’. And surely public health campaigns and education at school should be pointing the nation’s youth along the right path too?

But there is a lot of research to suggest that television advertising is the single most important factor influencing what children eat. In the US researchers have found that even when allowing for factors such as sex, reading level, ethnic background, parents’ occupation and educational level, television viewing correlated with bad eating habits and faulty understanding of the principles of nutrition.

In Sweden and Norway the pressure has been taken off parents because no advertisements at all are allowed during children’s programmes. In Denmark and Finland sponsorship of children’s television isn’t allowed either.

In the UK, however, there are no such restrictions on advertising directed at children. So unless parents try actively to correct distorted perceptions, the junk-food message from television ads will constantly undermine our effort to get our children to eat well.

How can we react to this? There’s always the off switch, of course, but it takes a resolute spirit to keep children away from the box. More realistically, we need to recognise that children will pick up a junk-food message when watching television and that if we do nothing we are simply letting that process run its course.

On the other hand, we can decide that we are going to combat it with counter-propaganda for a wider and more wholesome range of food consistent with the real-food approach outlined in pages 55–60. This involves instilling cynicism about the taste, quality and long-term effects of eating junk and a certain determination that we aren’t going to give in to the predictable demands generated by advertising.

If you want some effective strategies for doing this, turn to Getting the Message Across on pages 61–6 and The Fun and Skill of Food Shopping on pages 221–4. For ideas about how to deal with pestering demands for junk directly, see Sweets, Treats and Bans on pages 91–5.

GIFT-WRAPPED JUNK

Having difficulty getting your child to eat? Never fear, the processed food industry’s marketing team is here to help. It has devised some super products, designed to be snapped up by the nation’s kiddies and make shopping easy for poor old driven-to-distraction ‘Mum’. Lest she should miss these on her desperate dash round the supermarket, many chains now have helpful signs such as ‘Children’s Desserts’ on those prominent end-of-aisle locations to make them stand out.

Not that these tailor-made products for kids are easy to ignore, either for ‘Mum’ or for her arm-tugging companions. They sing out with brightly coloured images of jolly cartoon characters or the latest collectable toy. And because these familiar images intrigue children – after all they see them over and over again on children’s TV – trying to take a toddler or small child past them without being put under pressure to buy is about as easy as convincing them to walk past a playpark without going in.

The packaging that the images adorn is a triumph of technical wizardry. Anything straightforward is out – after all, we all know that kids have to be bribed into eating food, don’t we? So packaging takes over and generates an endless stream of novelties designed to capture that gullible junior market.

The straightforward old yogurt pot, for example, is out. Now yogurt must come in rigid two-compartment plastic containers with a dinky-doo addition to mix in. Anything goes, from multi-coloured sprinkles to chocolate polka dots or crunchy mini-biscuits – with the caveat that it must be sweet.

If two compartments already seem old hat, then bored children can be further tempted by that little fromage frais that comes with its own toy or handy little spoon. Worried about the environmental impact of all this moulded plastic? Then plump for that reusable container which can be broken down and then remodelled into a constructable toy.

Finding those rolls and sandwiches coming home uneaten in the lunch box? Why not give the kids a miniaturized box so that they can have the fun of assembling their own lunch, sandwiching processed ham and cheese with salty crackers as perfectly as any dovetail joint?

Cheese getting the thumbs-down? What about letting them make their own self-service selection of pick ’n’ mix miniaturised cheeses or trying them out with a runny cheese and dipping biscuits ensemble?

All right, no one these days seriously expects children to eat a bit of whole fish anyway, but what do you do if they begin to reject even fish fingers? Try out fishy shapes with special tails for them to hold as they dip them into that essential ketchup, of course. Dinosaur-shaped Kievs, reconstituted potato with cute little arms and legs or funny faces, condensed milk, fromage frais or yogurt drinks in squeezy tubes to suck at playtime, triangular milk shakes, mini cup cakes topped with a rice-paper image of their favourite cuddly character … so continues the litany of food products targeted at children.

You have to give these products credit for being both ingenious and inventive – as far as food manufacturers are concerned, that is. This endlessly novel repertoire of ‘children’s’ specialities allows them to take heavily processed junk food, gift-wrap it in images guaranteed to appeal to children, then sell it at a tidy profit.

There’s a limit, of course, to how much they can charge for a basic frozen potato shape, fish finger, fromage frais or processed cheese. But once they have succeeded in packaging it for children they can simply sit back and listen to those cash registers ringing. There’s nothing wrong with profits, of course, and manufacturers insist that they are only giving parents a helping hand. What despairing parent with an infamous ‘picky child’ would not be prepared to pay that little premium if these products get him or her to eat something he or she would not otherwise? But the price parents and children pay is quite high if we consider the quality of the food on offer. Real potatoes don’t have arms and legs – to give them these, they need to be moulded together with chemical additives. Cheese doesn’t squirt naturally – a range of chemical emulsifiers and cheap dairy by-products needs to be incorporated first. It seems that the food industry has ordained that all those yogurts and fromage frais prominently featuring images of the latest desirable ‘collectable’ just have to have chemical preservatives and flavourings. In order to process that ham into its easy-to-handle shape, it has to have lots of added water, polyphosphates and the standard flavour enhancers. Not to put too fine a point on it, if we wanted to home in on products stiff with chemical additives, then we need look no further than these gimmicky offerings.

Most of us know that when we buy these children’s novelties we are paying over the odds for something that isn’t that healthy. But we feel desperate. Better they eat something than nothing, we think. And as far back as any of us can remember, there’s been a deep-seated belief that by taking basic ingredients and repackaging them in forms that appeal to children, we can get them to eat what they might otherwise reject.

But is presentation really the best long-term tool to get children to eat? Does every food we offer them have to be disguised with amusing little ears or sugary sprinkles? If you have your doubts and would rather your children ate real food, not gift-wrapped junk, then turn to pages 86–90, Presentation, Boredom and the ‘Yuck’ Reaction, for ideas.

GOODBYE DINNER LADY, HELLO CASH CAFETERIA

From time to time we hear about a school that serves healthy lunches to its children, or another that has taken the huge step of banning sweets and crisps as snacks at break, asking pupils to bring fruit instead. Such schools generate media attention because they are so rare. The overwhelming bulk of food on offer from school catering services is over-processed, low-grade stuff from which it is almost impossible to make a wholesome selection even supposing you were an adult nutritionist, let alone a confused seven-year-old, trying to see through the queue ahead, all the time concentrating on holding your tray and not dropping your money.

Traditionally school meals have never been gastronomic experiences, but at least in the past each school employed its own cook and a good part of the food was real and unprocessed, however limited in range. Water was the standard drink. Nowadays the dinner ladies and cooks of the past have mainly been made redundant and the dinner hall has been replaced with a vastly reduced staff operating the ‘cash cafeteria’. Their task consists of reheating or assembling a specified number of portions of ready-prepared items, targeted at what the food industry euphemistically calls ‘young consumers’, for which a more candid description might be ‘consumers of junk’.

This is a consequence of the 1980 abolition of any nutritional standards for school meals and the introduction of a policy called ‘Compulsory Competitive Tendering’ (CCT), which was widely implemented in the 1980s. It obliged local authorities to choose the most ‘competitive’ (for which read cheap) catering on offer. In-house, labour-intensive school meals were widely axed in favour of cheaper, large-scale outside catering operations. Those that were retained had to match the lowest commercial tender.

Later in the 1980s, cuts in entitlement to free school meals reinforced the damage done by CCT. Fewer children qualified for free meals and this reduced the total demand. Less uptake means fewer economies of scale and makes it even harder to provide wholesome meals on a low budget. While in 1979 some 64 per cent of children ate school meals, by 1996 that figure had dropped to 43 per cent.

The end result is that there is basically no real cooking going on in the vast majority of schools. On the hot front, bought-in, ready-prepared Kievs, pizzas, even baked potatoes are simply reheated. Burgers and sausages are cooked briefly. Everything is ‘portion-controlled’ to eliminate waste and must consist of a single or small number of units of food which can be stored for some time, preferably frozen. Even the apparently healthy and wholesome option of soup is characteristically straight out of the packet – just add water.

In certain areas, local authorities are trying to make school meals more profitable by converting cafeterias into ‘food courts’ which ape fast-food chains. The usual burgers, pizzas and fizzy drinks are served from US-style food counters with illuminated displays of the food on offer – just like high-street chains – by staff wearing baseball caps. These ‘initiatives’ are sponsored by manufacturers of junk food and fizzy drinks whose corporate logos are emblazoned over the eating area, on polystyrene plates and cups and on staff uniforms. This trend means that children get no respite from junk-food advertising even at school.

Other schools now have no hot food whatsoever, a consequence of further local authority budget cuts. They tend to serve only the very worst sort of mass-produced sandwich which even makes its petrol-station forecourt equivalent seem gourmet. Many schools have been told to offer salads because nutritionists advocate these as a healthy choice. Once again, a child will be lucky to see a simple sliced tomato, cucumber disc, carrot baton or lettuce leaf. Instead, it’s plastic tubs filled with bought-in offerings, conspicuously short on vegetables and instead loaded up with starchy, stodgy offerings of rice, corn, pasta, pulses or egg, all slathered in commercial dressings.

Healthy-eating guidelines abound and school catering services can all offer chapter and verse on how they are doing their bit in this regard. But these guidelines are applied within the limits of mass-catering processed foods; they rarely mean that children are given more fresh fruit and vegetables or more wholesome basic ingredients. On the contrary, the most tangible manifestation of healthy-eating guidelines is an increased presence of highly processed items in the form of ‘low-fat’, ‘lite’ and ‘diet’ foods and drinks.

There are different justifications offered for the ‘healthiness’ of these items depending on what they are. The first is that they use margarine or vegetable fat instead of butter or lard. Yet some scientists believe that the trans-fats in the former may be at least as unhealthy as the saturates in the latter. The second is the substitution of skimmed milk for whole milk. However, although it has less fat, experts do not agree over whether skimmed milk is better for children. The third is the substitution of artificial sweeteners for sugar. Sweeteners do contain fewer calories than sugar, but many scientists have reservations over the safety of the former and whether or not they actually result in lower sugar consumption.

So the jury is still out on all these issues. But the current net effect of well-intentioned ‘healthy-eating’ guidelines in schools is that children are eating more heavily processed, technologically altered foods than before, foods that have not been tried and tested over time and whose long-term effect on human health is not yet known.

Processed techno-foods fit in very well with the economics of modern school catering, which boils down to running a cheap, lowest-common-denominator service with as little waste as possible. There is absolutely no slack for experimenting with more natural and nourishing foods which might require more labour, some food education and scope for experimentation.

In fact the prevailing budget pressures on school caterers – whether they are privatised or public sector – mean that they cannot afford to take any risk at all and so instead it’s now customary to major on the sure-fire ‘children’s foods’ such as crisps, fizzy drinks and confectionery because these are guaranteed to sell. These items have a long shelf life too. No surprise, then, when the typical statutory school cafeteria fruit bowl – generally full of the dullest fruits around, such as mealy-textured, bruised apples, shrunken oranges, bright green or wizened black bananas – has few takers.

Children aren’t always very good at describing school food. Here’s a taste of some of the delightful dishes commonly on offer.

A menu of modern school meals classics

For main course:

TURKEY/CHICKEN KIEVS/NUGGETS, SPAGHETTI AND POTATO SHAPES

(Cheap, processed, intensively reared meat in fatty fried crumb coating; sweet, stodgy tinned spaghetti; reconstituted dried potato and additives in fatty coating)

HOT DOG ROLL/SAUSAGE ROLL, BEANS AND POTATO SHAPES

(More cheapest of the cheap meat full of additives and water, stuck in a pappy, over-refined white roll or coated with artery-clogging, fat-laden pastry, with sweet and salty beans, plus spuds as above for added stodge)

VEGETABLE CURRY, MIXED VEG AND RICE

(This more promising-sounding vegetarian alternative consists of frozen ready-cut vegetables defrosted in sweet, starch-thickened catering curry sauce with waterlogged frozen vegetable ‘macedoine’ and gluey white rice)

CHEESE AND BACON/BROCCOLl/SWEETCORN FLAN, TURNIP, POTATOES

(Rubbery Cheddar, miscellaneous ‘savoury’ ingredients and reconstituted dried egg in a greasy layer of under-cooked pastry, with boiled diced turnip – about the cheapest frozen vegetable that can be bought in and about the least likely to appeal to children – with a scoop of rehydrated ‘mashed’ potatoes)

SAVOURY PASTIE, PEAS, CHIPS

(An unidentifiable-by-ingredient mulch combining processed meat such as corned beef or starchy potatoes with industrial fillers and flavourings, encased in lardy pastry; watery peas and reheated chips)

MEAT CASSEROLE, CABBAGE, POTATO

(A small amount of meat, often sausage, in thickened starchy sauce with frozen vegetables; boiled-to-death cabbage and the regulation scoop of rehydrated mash)

ROAST MEAT AND POTATOES, SPROUTS

(Pre-cooked, thinly sliced meat reheated in catering brown sauce, ready-cooked roasted potatoes and sulphurous, over-cooked sprouts)

‘HOME-MADE PIZZA’

(Thin slices of ready-made catering dough topped with watered-down tomato paste and rubbery Cheddar, then baked)

BATTERED FISH WITH TOMATO

(A small amount of desirable white fish dwarfed by its fatty batter, served with unadorned tinned tomatoes)

For pudding:

JELLY WHIP

(Shuddery synthetic dessert containing a litany of additives and no real anything else apart from generous amounts of sugar and gelatine)

DOUGHNUT AND CUSTARD

(Deep-fried, sugary stodge lubricated with extra sugar, colourings and flavourings, plus sugary, additive-laden ‘custard’, usually from a just-add-water mix)

CHOCOLATE CRISPIE/ICED SPONGE/CARAMEL FLAN/FLAPJACK/GINGERBREAD AND CUSTARD

(As above, minus the frying)

SEMOLINA AND FRUIT

(Lumpy milk pudding which rarely appeals to children, even in its unlumpy form, served with sweetened tinned fruit)

‘HOME BAKING’

(Cup cakes and tray bakes which are heavy on sugar, margarine and refined white flour)

To drink:

CARTONS OF FRUIT SQUASH AND ‘DRINK’/ BLACKCURRANT DRINK/COLA/CARBONATED ORANGE

(A heavy-handed serving of sugar topped up with water and additives)

HOT CHOCOLATE/MILK SHAKE

(Sugar, milk powder, flavourings and thickeners mixed up with water)

It’s no wonder that many children loathe school meals and abandon them at the first possible opportunity. But what about other school food?

School tuck shops have not served anything other than sweets, crisps and fizz since time immemorial. Nothing has changed in that department, except perhaps for the arrival of grain-based biscuits which purport to be healthy but whose heavy-handed sugar composition gives the lie to that.

What is new, however, is the arrival of snack and drink vending machines in schools. Filled exclusively with everything that is the antithesis of wholesome eating, these machines are becoming a common feature in many secondary and even some primary schools. Most teachers disapprove of them, but when a school is strapped for cash the income they offer can be tempting.

Looking at a secondary school in Merseyside in 1998, the Guardian reported that the profit to the school from its eight vending machines was forecast at £15,000 a year. Revenue on this scale can keep a music department in musical instruments or buy a much needed piece of equipment. But this system also handicaps the more wholesome alternative. In many schools nowadays, the only place a child can get a free and straightforward drink of tap water is in the washrooms!

School food has got so bad that it looks as if the government will reintroduce nutritional standards at least for school meals, if not for tuck shops. It remains to be seen how effective these will be in tackling the unhealthy monster that school meals have become.

But in the meantime, the current nature of school catering means that parents cannot assume that there is anything reasonably wholesome on offer on a regular basis.

How can we react to this? For solutions, turn to:

• School Food (pages 189–96)

• Twenty-five Good Snacks (pages 237–8)

• Ten Good Packed Lunches (pages 259–62)

CHILD (UN)FRIENDLY RESTAURANTS

Children in restaurants? Perish the thought! Our traditional ‘serious’ restaurant culture is not like that in other parts of the world, where children and restaurants are seen as two facets of normal life that can happily cohabit. British culture has always viewed restaurant-going as something special and unusual – an overwhelmingly sophisticated adult activity. As a nation we do not always find it ‘chic’ to have children around when we go out to eat. We tend to see them as philistines who ought to be fed separately in the privacy of their own homes until they attain civilised adulthood.

So we can’t pop out to the accommodating French bistro, which will prop up children on cushions and serve them moules marinière and a massive napkin without flinching. Nor can we drop in to family-run Italian ristorante, where adults cluck with approval as your baby noisily sucks up linguine with tomato sauce splattering everywhere. Neither is it like India or China, where family groups meet in restaurants and feed prime mouthfuls of their food to the youngest members.

It’s not unknown in the UK for some restaurants to have explicit ‘No children’ policies, while to take a child to others may entail pleading, negotiation and compromise: ‘Yes, we will be finished by 8.45 pm (so as not to disturb your business clientele),’ or ‘Yes, we will accept a freezing table more or less out in the lobby where no one else can see us.’ Many other establishments simply make it so expensive to bring children – by refusing to offer half-portions or make any concession to smaller appetites in their price structure – that they effectively prevent them from coming, without saying so in so many words.

The good news is that the climate is gradually changing – if only because some restaurants are enlightened enough to recognise that today’s child diners could be tomorrow’s clientele. Some fashionable and very ‘grown-up’ city establishments even become child-friendly zones at weekends, making positive efforts to attract families. Few restaurants fail to provide a high chair (especially if parents ask for one when booking) and many pubs that serve food no longer ban children.

But nevertheless, parents who would like to introduce their children to decent restaurant food from an early age still cannot count on a warm reception, and may fear a negative reaction based on past experience. However well behaved they think their child might be in a restaurant, few parents find it relaxing to be in an environment where they worry that staff eyebrows may be raised and fellow diners may ‘tut’ at the first sign of any restlessness or a querulous voice. So rather than run the risk of embarrassment and assume the stressful responsibility for seeing that the child behaves impeccably, many parents opt out and either don’t eat in these establishments themselves or leave the children at home when they do, thus limiting their children’s food experience.

But is this a problem? Aren’t there plenty of less serious but perfectly acceptable ‘child-friendly’ restaurants at the cheaper end of the market which welcome children with open arms and cater for their every need until they matriculate in the world of adult dining?

You know the formula. They are cheap and approachable chain eateries. If they are out of town, there will be lots of free parking conveniently outside. If you are on foot, it can seem that there is one on every accessible high-street corner or in every food court. They are coming down with trolley parks, high chairs, feeder cups, bottle warmers, microwaves to reheat baby food, nappy-changing facilities … every conceivable bit of kit that adults with children might need. Bustling and noisy, they enable you to eat anonymously without feeling that the eyes of all staff and diners are on you.

And let’s not forget that added incentive which any child will adore. Every day in these restaurants is like Christmas Day because you get a present to take away. We are not just talking about the usual giveaways, such as paper hats, balloons and badges which advertise the restaurant’s existence and link it to cuddly characters designed to appeal to children. We are talking ‘collectables’, a covetable free toy which encourages loyalty (and repeat visits) in order to complete the set. That’s a strong pull for young consumers.

It sounds so perfect for both child and parent … until you get to the food. The heart of the ‘child-friendly’ repertoire? Something fried with chips or something starchy. There’s burger and chips, Kiev and chips, fishy shapes and chips and sausage and chips, all slathered with copious quantities of sweet and salty brown or tomato sauce.

Vegetarian leanings? Try a bean burger, fried veggie rissoles, mini-pizza or refined white baguette with garlic butter. Want to avoid chips? Try fried hash browns or deep-crumb crunchy croquettes for a change.

Feeling thirsty at the thought of that little lot? Why not try an attractively priced whole-meal package, with its ‘free’ fizzy or diluted ‘contains-no-real-anything’ drink thrown in for added value?

So what you get when you step across the threshold of your average ‘child-friendly’ restaurant is a depressingly limited range of the ubiquitous children’s processed foods with a few stodgy snacks and fillers thrown in. It revolves around established ‘kiddie favourites’, formula food that children see all around them. Food that is predictable and ubiquitous. Food that does nothing to extend their horizons. Food that poses no new challenge whatsoever.

Most parents recognise that the food in such establishments is not that great – downright unhealthy even – but, under pressure to find a place that makes it easy to eat out with our children, we convince ourselves that it doesn’t really matter.

After all, children don’t live on restaurant food. Yes, we know that it is full of fat and sugar and heavily processed. As adults, we suspect that the raw materials are not exactly the finest around but, once in a while, what’s the problem? The food is affordable and even though there may be little or nothing we ourselves want to eat, these restaurants are convenient and children seem to like them and see visiting them as a treat.

But are they really such a treat for children? They may say they like eating out in this sort of place, even plead to be taken there, but we need to meet this almost inevitable positive response with a large element of scepticism. For many children, such establishments cannot help being anything but a treat simply because they are the only restaurants to which they are ever taken. Eating out – wherever it is and in whatever circumstances – is always going to be more exciting for a child than just another meal at home.

If we examine what the children actually eat when they visit these restaurants, their enthusiasm for the food may be illusory. A significant part of the meal may end up uneaten because the anticipation is more fulfilling than the reality. The food element may often be ignored in favour of more rewarding diversions, such as playing with the free toy, making endless trips to the toilet, playing in the ‘kiddie playpark’ outside, or watching the toddler at the next booth who has got his head stuck under the table.

We need to address not just the limitations of children’s experience in such restaurants but also the potential breadth of experience on which they are missing out. If this is the only kind of restaurant that children visit, they are getting no taste for the fascinating world of food that lies beyond their own homes. They are deprived of the opportunity of being seduced into trying something new just because it sounds, looks and smells fantastic – something different which extends their domestic food horizons.

When they are taken only to busy, fast-food outlets, they are also isolated from the stimulating sociability of sitting in a restaurant and the chance to enjoy the slower ritual which surrounds the delightful process of eating. Like keen readers stuck for ever on the same formula-book series, they are being denied the chance to discover something initially more demanding but ultimately much more fulfilling.

In fact, confining children only to formula ‘child-friendly’ restaurants is a huge missed opportunity. Handled well, most children can rise to the challenge of eating in a real restaurant serving real food. Even if a taste of real adult eating out is only a rare treat for a special occasion, it can nevertheless be one of the most effective ways of widening children’s food horizons and combating the ‘tunnel effect’ described on pages 71–3.

In the right restaurant, under the right circumstances, even the most conservative child can learn to eat more adventurously than anyone might expect, and the more open-minded child will relish the opportunity. Turn to pages 226–31, The Fascinating World of Restaurant Food, for ideas about how to make the most of eating out and ensure that restaurant-going is a happy experience all round.

PART TWO BREAKING THE MOULD AT HOME

THE REAL-FOOD APPROACH

When we decide that we aren’t going to give in to the prevailing defeatism that says children will eat only junk, we make an important commitment to feeding them well. But in a world where children are under constant pressure to eat badly, how can we carve out a different path?

One common approach is to continue with the structure of modern children’s food but try to change the content so that it is healthier and more acceptable. The idea is that children will think they are getting the undesirable things they want but, in reality, we are giving them something better.

The classic example here is the ‘healthy lollipop’. These are marketed as better for children because they are flavoured with fruit juice, tinted with natural rather than artificial colours and use artificial sweeteners instead of sugar. But are they really such an improvement? The proportion of fruit juice in them may be very small indeed and, as discussed on pages 6–7, although they do not attack tooth enamel it is questionable whether artificial sweeteners are desirable in wider health terms. But all that is irrelevant because even if these lollipops did have undisputed plus points over their conventional sugary, synthetic counterparts, there is a problem. We are still encouraging children to think that it’s all right to suck for long periods on something sweet and sticky. Do we really want to give them that message?

The same issue arises with popular foods that have had their original composition altered in line with modern ‘healthy-eating’ thinking. So now we have reduced-sugar baked beans, lower-fat crisps, ‘healthy’ sausages, oven chips, no-added-sugar yogurts, white bread with added fibre and so on. They purport to be better for children, though their merits are highly disputable. Although they might represent some improvement on the original junk food they still cannot measure up to the real thing (unadulterated yogurt, natural wholemeal bread etc.) in nutritional terms. The question remains, is this the kind of food we really want our children to eat or, at the end of the day, are we simply encouraging a slightly more acceptable face of the children’s diet ghetto?

If you analyse this approach, it is basically a slippery slope which attempts to hold the line against out-and-out junk food by curbing its worst excesses. It could produce very small benefits but it remains a defensive strategy, where adults attempt to draw a distinction between what’s not too bad and what’s worse. Now that’s a very difficult line to maintain.

What we need when we decide that we want our children to eat more nutritious food is a positive philosophy that challenges the assumptions on which children’s ghetto-food thinking rests and breaks away from its structures. We want to reverse the existing situation where ‘children’s food’ is shorthand for ‘worst food’. How do we make this happen?

Let’s begin by drawing up a profile of how we want our children to turn out eventually. We want them to:

• Enjoy food and delight in the pleasure of eating.

• Routinely eat a wide and varied range of foods from all food groups (excluding meat and fish if they are vegetarians).

• Select food that is good for them.

This is the opposite of the typical modern children’s diet where children appear to view food as fuel and tend to select a narrow range that is so imbalanced it may even defy the laws of nutrition.

So how should we set about seeing that the children we feed don’t go down this path? The single most important thing we’ll ever do as concerned adults is to adopt a ‘real-food’ approach. This means that we feed our children from as early an age as possible on food that is as fresh, whole and unprocessed as possible.

Of course there can be very few households in the land who are able to avoid processed food altogether. Very few of us have the time, energy or inclination to make all our own jam or bake our own bread, for example. A real-food policy doesn’t mean that we can never buy anything processed or take a short cut, just that the bulk of the food we eat is made up of fresh, unprocessed food that has been cooked at home – however quick and no-frills that cooking might be – and that we read the labels of any packaged foods we do buy to check that all the ingredients are wholesome, i.e. the sort we would use at home.

This doesn’t mean we have to be fanatical. There’s no need to feel a failure if you don’t roll your own pasta, squeeze your own lemonade or stuff your own sausages. It just means that, time and energy allowing, we favour home-made food. This needn’t be oppressively time-consuming. It takes very little more effort to bake potatoes from scratch than reheat oven chips, or to grill a piece of cod rather than a fish finger. It’s actually quicker to serve a cut-up tomato than tinned tomato soup.

The first and most persuasive reason for adopting a real-food approach is that whole, natural, unprocessed food that has been cooked at home is just much more delicious than its equivalent bought ready-made in a box or tin. There is no better way to woo a child than the smell of good, freshly cooked food wafting through the house. Processed, ready-made foods just don’t produce the same ‘feel-good’ effect. Once children become accustomed to eating fresh, unprocessed, home-cooked food they will enjoy it and develop a taste for it. This will give them real-food standards against which to taste other foods. By comparison, junky children’s food will not taste so good and will be much less tempting to them. So the taste for real food will limit their consumption of junk.

The second reason is that whole, unprocessed foods in their natural state that have been cooked at home tend to be much more nutritious than processed food. As the World Health Organisation has pointed out, ‘It is widely perceived that obesity has increased in industrialised societies as families turn away from home-prepared meals and utilise more fast or takeaway foods.’

Unprocessed foods come as nature intended, without chemical additives. Nor have they had their formula adulterated to meet the high fat-sugar-salt requirements that make processed foods profitable and palatable – especially children’s processed foods. Here are some examples of how processing changes the composition of food and makes it less healthy:

• 100 grams of baked cod contains 1.2 grams of fat. The same weight of cod fish finger contains 7.5 grams of fat before it is cooked and 12.7 grams of fat when fried.

• 100 grams of fresh raspberries contains 5.6 grams of sugar. The same weight of tinned raspberries contains 22.5 grams of sugar.

• 100 grams of raw lean beef contains 4.6 grams of fat and 61 milligrams of salt. The same weight of raw beefburger contains 20.5 grams of fat and 600 milligrams of salt.

• 100 grams of tomato purée contains 11.4 grams of sugar and 20 milligrams of salt. The same weight of tomato ketchup contains 22.9 grams of sugar and 1,120 milligrams of salt.

When children – or adults for that matter – eat a diet consisting of whole, unprocessed food cooked at home, it is quite difficult for them to eat a distorted, imbalanced diet. Of course it’s theoretically possible. You could go mad consistently with the butter on your breakfast toast or lashings of cream on that favourite cooked pudding. But your diet is much more likely to go awry when it is composed of processed foods with their vast hidden presence of fat, sugar and salt. So when we base our shopping on whole, unprocessed food, without being self-consciously rigid about ‘healthy eating’, calorie counting or reading nutrition labels, we are giving children food that is much more nutritious and healthy.

The third reason for adopting a real-food approach is that real food can satisfy the tastes of adults and children alike, so the person who buys the food has one shopping list, not the ubiquitous two-household list that must cater for sophisticated adult tastes alongside children’s junk-food palates. Obviously there are households where both adults and children live on processed food and there is no conflict. But where adults do have wider palates and hope that one day their children will share them, a real-food policy makes shopping much easier.

The fourth reason for a real-food policy is that it makes it harder for adults to cave in to demands for junk. How often do you hear adults admitting that they would never eat a certain food themselves but are just ‘buying for the kids’. When you operate this policy, you won’t be buying anything for the children that you wouldn’t want to eat yourself.

Not everyone finds it easy to adopt a real-food approach. Although we all might like to, it can seem impossible given the time pressure we are under. The good news is that, despite food-industry propaganda which says that people have no time to cook any longer and portrays any ‘real’ cooking activity as laborious and time-consuming, a real-food approach doesn’t have to mean endless hours of weary toil in the kitchen after work. It is perfectly possible to feed children on wholesome, fresh food without that. We just need to get into the habit of seeing that ‘fast’ doesn’t always translate into ‘junk’.

In our anxiety about fitting in cooking with all our other demands, it’s easy to assume that a real-food approach would be too time-consuming and impractical. But if we stop to examine that assumption, we may be able to see that it isn’t necessarily the case.

For example, it really doesn’t take much longer to grill a chicken breast than grill or fry some turkey nuggets but it makes for a much better and more wholesome meal. We could slather it with bought pesto and stick it in a toasted pitta bread with some raw vegetables to make an instant meal that will probably appeal to children. A dip made with Greek yogurt and mint to be served with raw vegetable batons can be prepared in minutes and it’s much healthier and ultimately more variable and interesting than chips with ketchup. See pages 239–51 for ideas for fast meals that appeal to both children and adults.

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